poetry, music, what-have-you

One night in Venice, near the Grand Canal,
A lovely girl was sitting by her stoop,
Sixteen years old, Elizabeth Gedall,
When, suddenly, a giant ice-cream scoop
Descended from the clouded blue corral
Of heaven and scooped her skyward with a loop-
The-loopy motion, which the gods of Venice
Saw, and, enraged they left off cosmic tennis

And plotted their revenge. They thought some outer
Space denizen or monster had decided
To take this child, perhaps who cared about her
And wished to spare her heart a world divided,
Or else wanted to hug, kiss, and clout her,
And, lust upswelling, the right time had bided,
Or something such—so thought, at least, the gods of
Her native city, famed for bees and matzoh.

Venice, Peru, of course, is where it happened,
A city modeled on the Italian one
Which was all paid for by Commander Papend,
A wealthy Yugoslav who liked his fun.
The Com had sexual urges large as Lapland
And was set for action as a gun
In madman’s hands who hates the world around him—
But Com was filled with love, his heart all pounding!

And so he’d made this North Italian jewel,
Canals and palaces on every side,
An urban re-creation, not renewal,
A daring lust’s restatement of life’s pride;
Huge bumboats carrying marble, masks, and fuel
Clogged South American streams, til Nature cried
“Some madman’s building Venice in Peru!
Abomination beneath the sky’s blue!”

* * *

Kenneth Koch – as you can probably tell at this point after reading a few stanzas – was a poet who believed that – gasp! – poetry could be fun and lighthearted! I know, right?! What a nut! But he and his pals Frank O’Hara (coming next week) and John Ashbery, in the wake of the mythological drudgery that was Modernism, believed just that, and through their works tried to infuse poetry with a jolt of the weird, of the contemporary, of pop culture. The excerpt above begins his long poem “The Duplications.” I’ll be honest, I’ve yet to make it all the way through this poem’s insanity, but I will tell you that on the next page alone Koch references Canada Dry, Walt Disney, Minnie Mouse, and Salvador Dali.

I stand on my head on Desolation Peak
And see that the world is hanging
Into an ocean of endless space
The mountains dripping rock by rock
Like bubbles in the void
And tending where they want—
That at night the shooting stars
Are swimming up to meet us
Yearning from the bottom black
But never make it, alas—
That we walk around clung
To earth
Like beetles with big brains
Ignorant of where we are, how,
What, & upsidedown like fools,
Talking of governments & history,
—But Mount Hozomeen
The most beautiful mountain I ever seen,
Does nothing but sit & be a mountain,
A mess of double pointed rock
Hanging pouring into space
O frightful silent endless space
—Everything goes to the head
Of the hanging bubble, with men
The juice is in the head—
So mountain peaks are points
Of rocky liquid yearning

~ ~ ~

Whenever I get lost, thinking too much about the world and how hard it can be sometimes, I remember that there is the lonely fire lookout on Desolation Peak.

Hey. Howdy. Well the novel-writing thing went well! I did finish, two days ahead of time, with about 51,500 words. It’s about a 200-page paperback if you want to think of it that way. Though as you can see it left me with little excess energy for posting up some poems or any of the other randomness that goes on around here.

I did honestly learn quite a bit about writing – and about myself (yawn) – in writing that novel. Tenatively titled A Trick of the Clouds, by the way. Maybe. For now. The first thing is was finding that could do this at all. I’ve never thought of myself as much of a prose writer. Never really had an eye for dialogue or plot, but I can describe the hell out of a place, so I veered into poetry long ago. But I found that the two writing forms are not mutually exclusive and I could use my poetry chops to expand the prose into new and interesting avenues.

Also, take note: Just because you’ve come up with a great idea or line that you think will define your work, or one of your characters, doesn’t mean you’ll remember it later. This book is littered with ideas, some terrific, some that seemed terrific at the time, that never came to fruition by the end. All these little seeds that I was going to grow and tie together, but then forgot to tie together in the simple attempt to just get enough words on the page. So take notes, people.

Writing 200 pages with words on them is easy. I found it sad, seeing all the NaNoWriMo contestants who had their 50k words done by the end of the second week. It just made me think they couldn’t have possibly put that much heart or thought into it. Yes, Kerouac did it, but he was a genius. And he was on benzedrine. And it was basically nonfiction with the names changed. I’m not Kerouac, you’re not Kerouac.

I barely understood my characters at all by the end of the second week. I certainly wasn’t familiar enough with them to bring them to a satisfying resolution. Now, by the end of the fourth week, and the end of the novel, I was a quivering wreck trying to finish their story. Writing a novel is hard. Especially in a month. Writing something that is totally original might be completely impossible. You just have to take the best of what you have and put it together in a way that is as unique as possible. I got so mad at myself seeing all the passive voice and all the cliched lines pouring out of my fingers. I would moan out loud as I hit the backspace button over “the stars shined quietly” what seemed like a million times. I was almost sick to my stomach every time I wrote “he” or “she” because I felt that I had written it so goddamn many times that the words had become meaningless as descriptors. I would write something and then realize I had stolen it wholesale from another book. This is different than the mass of “inside jokes” and quotes that I included, which was fun.

But then again, this is really a rough draft. Such as it is, I’m pretty proud of it. The ending especially is pretty good. I love my last sentence. There are so many nifty things that I feel so clever for thinking of. So many great moments that feel genuine and make me smile. I think that with some work – after some serious time apart to let things settle – this could really be something. I hope the brave proofreaders who have actually requested to read this will think the same way.

Two bricklayers are setting the wallsof a cellar in a new dug out patchof dirt behind an old house of woodwith brown gables grown over with ivyon a shady street in Denver. It is noonand one of them wanders off. The youngsubordinate bricklayer sits idly fora few minutes after eating a sandwichand throwing away the paper bag. Hehas on dungarees and is bare abovethe waist; he has yellow hair and wearsa smudged but still bright red capon his head. He sits idly on topof the wall on a ladder that is leanedup between his spread thighs, his headbent down, gazing uninterestedly atthe paper bag on the grass. He drawshis hand across his breast, and thenslowly rubs his knuckles across theside of his chin, and rocks to and froon the wall. A small cat walks to himalong the top of the wall. He picksit up, takes off his cap, and puts itover the kitten’s body for a moment.Meanwhile it is darkening as if to rainand the wind on top of the trees in thestreet comes through almost harshly.

Denver, Summer 1947

~ ~ ~

Now, the last Ginsberg post is not to say that his early stuff is not great. It is of course great, monumental and beautiful. It goes without saying. Just look at this. This scene he creates, and the way he dissolves it at the end with almost equal beauty.

Reading Sung poems, I think of my poems to Nealdead a few years now, Jack undergroundinvisible – their faces rise in my mind.Did I write truthfully of them? In later timesI saw them little, not much difference they’re dead.The live in books and memory, strong as on earth.

“I do not know who is hoarding all this rare work.”

Old One the dog stretches stiff legged,soon he’ll be underground. Spring’s first fat beebuzzes yellow over the new grass and dead leaves.

What’s this little brown insect walking zigzagacross the sunny white page of Su Tung-p’o’s poem?Fly away, tiny mite, even your life is tender –I lift the book and blow you into the dazzling void.

“You live apart on rivers and seas…”

You live in apartments by rivers and seasSpring comes, waters flow murky the salt wave’s covered with oily dungSun rises, smokestacks cover the roofs with black mistwinds blow, city skies are clear blue all afternoonbut at night the full moon hesitates behind brick.How will all these millions of people worship the Great Mother?When all these millions of people die, will they recognize the Great Father?

Cherry Valley, April 20, 1973

~ ~ ~

This is absolutely one of my favorite Ginsberg poems. People tend to focus on his work of the 40s and 50s as his most vital, and it’s easy to forget that when Jack and Neal died – when many people thought beat itself was dead – men like Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and so many more) carried on with the Zen beat message and poetry for generations. Ginsberg is gone now too, a tiny mite blown into the void, but even today Snyder and Ferlinghetti and others are as vital today as they ever were, perhaps more so. It would be a sad mistake for poetry and beat fans to focus only on the Six Gallery days and forget the beautiful lifetimes that followed.